GLASGOW

Past Glasgow Event: VOL 35

VOL 35

October 25, 2018

@
The Whisky Bond

As the age of automation looms, we are now more so than ever at risk of losing elements of our day to day responsibilities or our jobs entirely. In the recent proliferation of ‘bullshit jobs’ that occupy more and more nuanced versions of traditional work, is this impending future in fact something we should look forward to rather than dread? Are we really 'hardwired to work' as capitalism has lead us to believe? Or, if freed from the clock-in clock-out system are we instead offered a more tranquil, more social and more engaged human experience?

In this Pecha Kucha, we will hear from different thinkers, artists, organisations and political groups to address the question of the future of work and present ideas on how our developing work-culture might affect our way of life, our economy, our cities and professions.

PRESENTATIONS FROM THIS EVENT

Allan Young is a Green Party councillor for Govan. He is the Glasgow Greens spokesperson on the economy and workforce and sits on the City Administration Committee. Allan’s background is in campaigning, policy and research around a range of issues including human rights, refugees and antipoverty work. He lives in Ibrox with his wife Rachael and his two cats.

Still Not Quite is a fictional online marketplace for objects and ideas from plausible futures. SNQ team believes that the design of the future of objects and services should be as democratic as possible and aims to open the possibility to explore the future to a larger public. To do this Still Not Quite aims to collaborate with communities, organisations and institutions and explore future issues close to their area of expertise. Their research is made public via a fictional online department store, where it is possible to browse through products from different futures they collaboratively explored.

Over the last two years Sophia Grant has been working in the Service Design and Innovation Directorate at Skills Development Scotland to define the skills that Scotland’s people will need to thrive in the fourth industrial revolution, and to consider how these skills will be embedded in SDS’s apprenticeship qualifications. Before arriving in Scotland, Sophia worked for the New Zealand Department of Internal Affairs where she applied human-centred design to transform public services relating to passports, citizenship and births, deaths and marriages.

Brian Weaver’s previous paid employment includes drug sales, money lender, and cowboy. In his fifties he managed the Business Starts programme for Highlands and Islands Enterprise, and in his sixties he fronted HISEZ, which gives business advice to social enterprises, while managing to be a profitable, not-for-profit business in its own right. Impact Hub Inverness continues the work of HISEZ, but also provides a small co-working space with 100 partners world-wide. Brian didn’t predict the fax, the computer or the mobile phone, and doesn’t have a clue about what will come next.

Oscar McKay is a recent graduate of GSA’s product design course and fascinated in speculating on what’s going to come next. In his dissertation, he explored how life will be for casual workers in the future. His Pecha Kucha will focus on the social change required for a better future relationship to un-employment.

Shona Macnaughton is an artist based in Glasgow. Her practice is rooted in performance, writing and film, and questions of technology, subjectivity and labour. She explores the political conditions around specific architectures and institutional frameworks. Alongside this she takes part in projects with the collective Eastern Surf. Forthcoming projects include We Nurture, a commission from Collective gallery, Edinburgh.

Citizen’s Basic Income Network Scotland are a charity supporting the Basic Income movement in Scotland. We work with a network of Basic Income advocates - providing training and a platform for discussion. We lend our expertise to government and share the stories of people who would benefit from a Basic Income.

The Scottish Artists Union is the ONLY representative voice for visual and applied artists in Scotland. Artists tend to work alone, individually we have little influence or political ‘clout’. Together we can make policy-makers appreciate the needs and importance of artists in the Scottish cultural, social and economic scene. On top of that you get free public liability and professional indemnity insurance, access to our free learning and professional development programme and a range of benefits.

Isabella Bunnell is a communications designer at design agency, Snook. She works on making their stories faster, smarter, and better looking : to new and familiar faces. Outside of this she works as a illustrator, working for clients big and small. Her visual work explores equality, humour and colour and she usually finds herself at the intersection of all three.

Chris Speed is Chair of Design Informatics at the University of Edinburgh where he collaborates with a wide variety of partners to explore how design provides methods to adapt, and create products and services with a networked society. He is especially favours trangressive design interventions, to help identify and promote the values we care about most, including the design for the blockchain, an application for sham marriages, and an SMS platform for shoplifting. Chris is co-editor of the journal Ubiquity and co-directs the Design Informatics Research Centre that is home to a combination of researchers working across the fields of interaction design, temporal design, anthropology, software engineering and digital architecture, as well as the PhD, MA/MFA and MSc and Advanced MSc programmes.